But, he got in with the wrong crowd and sod drugs and got in trouble with law and order.Īfter his father left, his mother raised him single-handedly. After he became self-sufficient, he took care of his mother and cousins.īeing born on 24 August 1968, James Toney is 53 years old as of today’s date 3rd July 2022. His height is 5ft 10in tall, and his weight is 99 kg. He had a brief amateur career of 35 matches, including 33 wins (32 knockouts) and two losses. After starting in 1988, it was here that he met his trainer Bill Miller who is said to have created his traditional or orthodox style of boxing. James had fought in middleweight, super middleweight, cruiserweight, heavyweight. The former #1 contender has fought fourteen times under the UFC banner and has challenged for the title twice.In the middleweight division, he won IBF and the Lineal middleweight championship. Gray Maynard ranks 97th on this list as the UFC veteran has only earned $482,000 throughout his career. Out of all 953 fighters that have fought in the UFC, Toney ranks 92nd in career earnings when he's not even an MMA fighter, landed 4 punches, and only fought once! What's even more mind-boggling is some of the names that he's ahead of on this list of 953 fighters.
Upon further investigation of this financial/ethical conundrum, I stumbled upon some stunning facts. It's discouraging to see a disgruntled boxer just slide in and dwarf everyone's salary. Not to mention that he won the fight! It's not a very promising message to send to aspiring fighters who are pouring their hearts into training, hoping to eventually make good money. I find it hard to justify Toney making exactly double what Couture made in that fight when Couture is a pioneer of the sport, Hall-of-Famer and has held belts in multiple weight classes. If you combine what Penn and Couture made for their fights ($150,000 and $250,000 respectively), it still would not total what Toney pulled in. BJ Penn and Randy Couture are the only two fighter's in the company's history to hold titles at two weight categories. Toney's salary was not even close to anyone else on the card. So far this is looking like a worse investment than my "ShamWow." This breaks down to $125,000 per punch landed. The fight stats indicate that he landed a mere 4 punches, all of which were glancing shots from his back. This begs the question if his presence did not have the desired effect, and he had zero MMA experience, then why was he the highest-paid fighter on the card? He got paid $500,000 for this "one and done" appearance. The card had enough big names on it to begin with and probably would have drawn in similar numbers anyway, regardless of James Toney. Of course, Randy Couture was on the card as well and he always garnered heavy interest. BJ Penn was fighting Frankie Edgar in a highly-anticipated rematch for the Lightweight Championship and Gray Maynard was fighting Kenny Florian in a number one contender's fight. It brought in 535,000 buys on pay-per-view, which is not horrible by any means, but there were already numerous high-profile fighters on the card. If this lesson was applied at UFC 1, why would it change seventeen years later at UFC 118 when the sport has evolved into the juggernaut that it is today?īy the numbers, this PPV wasn't exactly a home-run. How sadly mistaken he was, as Gracie double-legged him, mounted him and put him in a choke while Jimmerson tapped out looking helpless and confused. This lesson was already demonstrated all the way back in 1993, at UFC 1! Poor Art Jimmerson walked to the octagon with one boxing glove on, thinking he was going to grab Royce Gracie, one of the greatest MMA fighters of all-time, with his bare-hand and pound him with the other. Another issue was that this fight was redundant, as we had already seen what happens when a pure boxer meets a grappler in an MMA fight. This was apparent when Couture passed his guard within seconds of being in the top position. It was very apparent that Toney had not trained a lick in Wrestling, Muay-Thai, Kick-Boxing and especially Jiu-Jitsu. I say this because while Toney was a championship-level boxer with numerous titles and accolades, boxing is only one discipline in MMA.
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